Hortonworks will be launched in July with an initial staff of about 25 employees. It will accelerate the development of Hadoop and making it easier for enterprises and vendors to install, manage and use the software, said Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of Yahoo's Cloud Platform Group.

Yahoo, which uses Hadoop extensively to serve up its ads and content, has much interest in seeing Hadoop develop and thrive. "So we're an investor, partner, and user of Hortonworks," Rossiter said.

Eric Baldeschwieler, former vice president of Hadoop engineering at Yahoo, will be Hortonworks' CEO. His priorities include strengthening the open-source community around Hadoop, establishing a partnership program and finding customers. Hortonworks will also work to make the software easier to manage and install, and will improve its availability and performance.